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Comment by hzhou321 | Hacker News Reader

I think the real question is how to justify funding a professor who has nothing to prove his value.

Recall in history how often we rediscover certain great theory or study of one or some underpaid scholars hundreds of years later? I believe it is reasonable to agree that we need keep funding to support a population of scholars whose contribution cannot be readily and accurately assessed. On the other hand, we also cannot afford to support every one who merely claim to be a scholar. So the question is how to keep the balance.

Shall we assume having professors writing articles that no one reads, is one mechanism to keep that balance? Even though the mechanism itself is far from ideal, but until something better prove itself, it is a futile argument.

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Right, the thing that rubs me the wrong way about this article is the assumption that, because nobody reads what these professors are writing, the work is crap and should not have been done.

The real solution to the problem is that we should find ways to get more people to read what these professors are writing! (Which will also have the side effect of improving the quality of any portion of it that truly is crap.)

Professors are paid to write. They get paid to write even if nobody reads what they write. Is it really such a strange assumption that in many cases nobody reads what they write becauase it's just the academic equivalent of SEO spam? Manipulating h-index scores is not unheard of.

Having read quite a lot of research papers over the years from relatively 'hard' subjects, I can't honestly say it's helped me in any way. The ones in computer science tend at least to be mostly free of logic errors or misleading descriptions, but venturing into other fields is a reality check: way too many papers are terrible even in supposedly respected journals.

The article points out a frequent problem of terrible papers: they cite other papers that don't actually say what the cited claim is saying. "Of those articles that are cited, only 20 percent have actually been read." If so few people are even reading the papers, is it any wonder nobody reads cited papers to check the citation is valid? This happens even in fairly important scientific and medical papers, so I can't imagine how bad it gets in religious or gender studies.

I happen to think that most of the research is crap. However, I would argue that is not necessarily something need to be fixed. Discoveries of the century often need some bases even though most of the bases just serve as background support.

Historically research was not necessarily a job, let alone a job incentivized by how many papers someone churns out.

Sometimes, like in the case of Spinoza, research was done in someone's spare time while they worked a non-time consuming job (lens grinding). In other cases lecturers, such as Adam Smith, published very little and instead focussed on teaching.

> Historically research was not necessarily a job

Quite right. Research usually are the privileges of noble men who don't necessarily need to work for life. But historical reference does not necessarily mean the best. It may be more desirable to have a mechanism so more talents can afford to do research.

In an era of open access journals, and a circumstance where the vast majority of PhD students don't end up gaining an academic job, perhaps its time to both drop the convention that lecturers research and researchers lecture.

The state will have to play the role in funding individual research, since private institutions may want to keep knowledge to themselves as a competitive advantage, or otherwise would be unwilling to fund research e.g. in the humanities.

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